Three photographs.

Photo Number One – a plumpish boy with straight fair hair, rudimentarily cut and combed, poses awkwardly at the top of three steps. He is wearing dark purple trousers (a little tight on the thigh). On his top half, he sports a lighter-coloured purple garment that today retailers like Next call a ‘zip’ or a ‘zip through’ cardigan, but which, in the 1970s, the boy’s mother called a ‘jerkin’. The boy is not standing straight but unaccountably leaning to the left, his arms a little apart from his body in a sort of oval. His smile is unmistakeably forced. The whole effect looks very stiff, very uncomfortable, very embarrassed, and not unlike how one might imagine a purple penguin would pose. Confronted by a photographer. Or his mother. Asking them, ‘Why?’ The reason, it turns out, is the occasion of the seven-year-old boy’s (not the penguin’s) First Holy Communion; the location, just outside his family’s local Catholic Church; and the purple ensemble in lieu of a suit that they didn’t do in his size and which his parents couldn’t afford even if they did.

Photo Number Two – the same plumpish boy, his straight fair hair now sporting a more sophisticated pudding-basin trim, stands, left-side on, astride a bicycle. A purple bicycle. He wears dark purple shorts (a little snug and, perhaps, just a little too short) and a jumper (or is it a jerkin? his arm is in the way) of a lighter shade of purple under which he is wearing a shirt, possibly mauve, with a nice-looking collar. He is wearing sandals. And socks. A classic fashion combination of 1970s Britain. He and his bicycle are posing on a lawn. A children’s swing (with a purple frame) is behind them. The complementary colours of swing, bike and boy contrast nicely against the green of the grass. The design of the two-wheeler is what, in less enlightened times, might be termed ‘a lady’s bike’. The stereotype is reinforced by the wide, white saddle and the large gingham-patterned saddle-bag behind, criss-crossing in white, violet and plum. It is definitely not a Racer, a Chopper or a Raleigh. On the crossbar, almost hidden by the boy’s leg, you can just make out the word ‘Typhoon’. Pleased with his own choice of seventh birthday present, however, his smile is genuine and relaxed.

Photo Number Three – the plumpish boy with fair hair stands on the same lawn, purple swing still in the background. He is wearing a homemade ‘period’ costume: regency-style knee-length breeches in dark purple above white stockings and, of lighter purple, a jacket (perhaps a little tight) with yellow braiding down the centre and across his middle. At the sleeves, and at the boy’s neck, are white lace cuffs and jabot. On his feet, black shoes have been accessorized with decadent homemade bows of unmistakeable aluminium foil. The boy is not smiling, and his screwed-up eyes and crimson cheeks suggest he has just been crying. Nowhere to be seen in the photograph is the adapted black beehive wig, with ponytail attachment, which the boy briefly enjoyed wearing to complete the costume but then had to be abandoned in the face of his father’s shouty objections to his wife that, over his dead body, was any son of his going out looking like a big Jessie, fancy-dress party or no fancy-dress party.

 ***

I have moved my mother into a care home. I am clearing out her flat. Sorting through the bits of the past: what to keep, what to throw away. I find my first ever photograph album. From the pictures of my sixth, seventh and eighth birthdays, strewing the album in no logical chronology, I can deduce that its contents span the years between the summers of 1973 and 1975.

The 1973 birthday photos are among those of our family holiday to Jersey that year. Reached by my first ever flight on an aeroplane, and accommodated in a guest house, it was a truly exotic departure from the usual miners’ fortnight caravan on the south Wales coast. No wonder the loan he had to take out to pay for all of this burdened my father for many years afterwards. I pose with my presents in the bay window of our family room overlooking St Aubin’s Bay. It would all be idyllic if the flush in my cheeks didn’t jog the memory that my father had just been shouting at me for something. Again.

The album also holds the photographic evidence that my 1974 birthday was the first and only party to which I invited school friends, as they had been inviting me to theirs during the previous year. This was a one-off because, firstly, while always having a birthday in the middle of the school holidays was great, many friends were not around at that time to be able to come to a party and we were often away on holiday in any case. But, secondly, I was usually too deeply embarrassed to have friends round to my house and strived to ensure that the Venn diagram circles of my separate worlds of school and family (especially my father) seldom overlapped. But this year, with a few weeks to go before the arrival of my new brother, and the inherent strain of this unplanned event on the family finances (the further postponement of my mother’s return to work having an unwelcome impact upon the ability to meet the repayments of the ongoing loan for the previous year’s Channel Island extravagance) meant an inescapable staycation. And so it happened that year that I got a very self-conscious birthday party at home and a lovely purple bike. At least the former wasn’t fancy dress.

The photograph album had been bought for by my godmother (and favourite cousin) for my eighth birthday in 1975 because the present from my mum and dad that year was the rather alarmingly styled Polaroid Colour Swinger Land Camera. This turned out to be only one element of one of my most memorable ever birthdays. For starters, the camera, was an Instamatic. As the photographer, I could see my pictures almost as soon as I had pressed the shutter button. Unlike later models which would automatically spew out the print on which an image slowly materialised, this mid-70s version required you to pull out manually the print contained within a sheath of photographic paper. You then had to hold it secure (as the instructions advised) in the warmth of your armpit while the layers of film emulsion and developing agent inside the cover created the image sixty seconds after the light, let in by the briefly open shutter, hit the film, triggering the whole chemical transfiguration. The not unpleasant synthetic smell as you peeled off the photo a minute later only enhanced the thrill of this technological magic.

Compared to the usual waiting of days, if not weeks, for Boots to send your rolls of film away to be developed in another part of the country, achieving the same result in a matter of seconds under your arm was nothing short of a miracle.

The camera was bought in a specialist shop on the streets of Chiswick and not in the shopping centre near my home in south Wales. Another memorable treat of this birthday had been a family day trip to London, my father driving for the first time ever to the Big Smoke, and in our new Morris Marina. For some of the journey I sat in the front passenger seat, watching in terrified excitement as the speedometer touched 100 mph, my father showing off the power of the car’s engine, and displaying a rare instance of his own daring. We were wearing seatbelts even though it was not yet the law to do so, as befitted my Dad’s more usual caution and aversion to risk, and because we’d all been persuaded by the advice of that reliable face of probity, Jimmy Saville OBE, to ‘Clunk, Click. Every Trip’. Parking for free on a side street of the London suburb, just off the M4, and miles out of town, my father avoided the daunting city-centre traffic and put us in a good place to execute a quick getaway back to Wales later that evening.

This parking arrangement meant a further journey into central London via the Underground – another thrill of the birthday and a first for me and my sister and brother. However, my own excitement was initially laced with trepidation. Exactly five months before, on February 28, Leslie Newson had inexplicably driven his Northern Line train into the end wall at Moorgate Station, the vehicle apparently accelerating as it sped along the platform. Forty-three people were killed and over seventy injured. Four days after the calamity, Newson’s body was the last to be removed from the wreckage, his driver’s cab compressed from its normal depth of three feet to a mere six inches, his decomposing remains crushed by a correspondingly sickening proportion.

The recent memory of this disaster played heavily on my mind as we rattled through the dark tunnels of the Tube, but with our continued survival at every passing station my enjoyment of the experience slowly surpassed my fears and I marvelled at the speed, the noise and the smell. Back above ground, we saw a lot of tourist London that day: Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London, Downing Street. Puzzlingly, the photo taken of me standing outside the famous Number 10 door was either over-exposed or lost, an annoyance to me when I later developed an obsession with politics – and with the first female inhabitant of that famous address. We even took a black cab at one stage and, at the end of the day, ate out at a restaurant (probably a Berni Inn) before the drive home.

It was a very good birthday and – with the camera – must have cost my parents quite a bit. But then, like the year before, there was going to be no summer holiday this year either. With the cost of the new car on top of everything else, money was still short. This day trip to London, lavish to my eyes, was nevertheless a cheaper way to compensate for my birthday not being celebrated during a week in a caravan at Porthcawl, as it so often had been. Thinking about it now, I suspect the reason the day trip replaced the week away was because my Dad worked his annual leave entitlement to get the extra cash, sacrificing his time off for the financial stability of his family.

At some point on the journey home my father started fishing for the expression of thanks from me which I would have given unbidden in my own time, probably when we had finally got back home. For some reason, I played dumb. I think what irked was my instinctive understanding of his self-centredness and a neediness to be acknowledged and praised for his own generosity – like Ebenezer Scrooge, as the ‘founder of the feast’, at the Cratchit’s meagre Christmas dinner. Perhaps, showing a teenage attitude well ahead of my years, I think I was just embarrassed and feeling awkward at being asked to say ‘thank you’ as if I were a four-year-old rather than as the mature young man twice that age that I saw myself. My truculent reluctance to play ball inevitably sparked one of his trademark explosions and cast a pall over what had been a lovely day. Of course, with hindsight, I should just have given him what he wanted. But I didn’t. My disdain for him, and his frustration and always just-under-the-surface anger with me (the real reasons for which were not to going to come out – literally – for many years), were an ominous sign of the much worse that was yet to come in our infamously fractious relationship.

Until writing this piece, I had always puzzled over my complicated relationship with my birthday – both wanting and shying away from the attention as well as hating the pressure to perform for those using gifts and treats as a substitute for real love and acceptance. It has also reinforced my understanding of the contradictions of my father, even if I cannot forgive them. Never were the lines from Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol more apposite:

Some love too little, some too long,
  Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
  And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
  Yet each man does not die.

My relationship with Oscar Wilde’s statement colour is, thankfully, untainted and as straightforward as it has always been. I love purple. Happy birthday to me!